Serviio

Serviio is a very good, free media server for the Mac. The app allows you to stream your media files (images, videos and music) to several types of devices on your home network.

These devices are called renderers or clients. Some of the supported devices are smart TVs, Bluray players, game consoles, and mobile phones. Not all the devices will support all the settings that Serviio has to offer, but if the renderer supports UPnP, you will surely be able to connect and stream content.

To customize the settings, you have to launch the Serviio Console. This has all the configuration options that can be changed. There are 7 different tabs: Status, Library, Metadata, Transcoding, Presentation, Console Settings and About. The first tab shows the status of the server and lets you stop and start it. You can also add IP renderer profiles from here. The most useful tab in my opinion is the "Transcoding" tab. Here, you can enable or disable transcoding and choose where your transcoded files are stored and how many CPU cores you want to use. There are also quality settings.

I tried Serviio with an XBMC renderer. XMBC found the server without any problems, but wasn't able to see all the files in my shared folder. Only a couple of folders were found. All the files that were found played without a hitch.

Serviio sorts your content in categories (Audio, Images, Video). And it gives you an option to search in the folders. However, I didn't find a way to tell the app not to sort the content for me. All I wanted from Serviio was a sharing app that would let me see a shared folder on XBMC, and after 10 minutes of fiddling with the app, I couldn't get it to show all the content. I am not saying it can't be done, just that I couldn't do it easily.